Design of modern industrial products, such as vehicles, machines, equipment, architectures, consumer products, etc., often involve complex structural assemblies. Modern structural assemblies may be designed to be compact and cost efficient. In addition, the structural assemblies associated with hoses and/or harnesses often include wirings, cables, pipes, and other specific lines for purposes such as control, communication, fluid power or hydraulics, etc. Because a particular structure may only support a certain types of configuration of the hoses or harnesses, it may be desired to consider the routing of the hoses or harnesses during the design process of the structural assemblies such that the hoses may be aligned properly.
However, even when the hose and harness routing is pre-considered, the designed structural assemblies may frequently undergo design changes for many reasons. Each time the structures are changed, the hose and harness routing often needs to be performed manually to adjust the changes in structure. Such manual performance may be time and/or cost consuming.
Techniques for computer based routing calculation of the hoses and harnesses have been developed to reduce the amount of manual performance. For example, Sunand Sandurkar, Wei Chen, GAPRUS —genetic algorithms based pipe routing using tessellated objects, Computer in Industry 38, pp. 209-223 (1999), discloses a genetic algorithm based routing algorithm to globally search a routing path between two end points with minimum length and minimum number of bend. However, such a genetic algorithm often fails to consider various practical factors, such as priority between paths, real size of the path, etc., and/or to consider multiple routing paths of different connections simultaneously.
Methods and systems consistent with certain features of the disclosed systems are directed to solving one or more of the problems set forth above.